Introduction

Entity Framework’s entity (which has a relationship with other entities) cannot serialize with .NET Framework’s existing object like JavascriptSerializer or DataContract JSON Serializer or JsonResult. So I needed to solve that problem by myself.

Background

In one of our projects, we used ASP.NET MVC for presentation/business logic layer and Entity framework for data access layer. At that time I faced the problem. I needed to call server side methods from client side JavaScript with the help of XMLHttp request. In the client side, we used JQuery (JavaScript library). The server side methods needed to return data with Jason format. At first I tried to use JsonResult (MVC framework) to transform that data to JSON format, then one error message was thrown. The error message was “Circular Reference error”. Then I used JavascriptSerializer class. But the same thing occurred. Then I tried DataContract JSON Serializer. I got the same error once again.

I was wondering what I should do. I first started Googling to solve my problem. There I found that Entity framework’s Entity serialization had some problem with the existing JSON Serializer provided by the .NET Framework. So, I started thinking of writing my own small serializer to solve and use Entity framework with JSON.